IBM working on Microsoft Office for Linux

As part of its initiative to put Linux on the desktop, IBM Corp. wants to migrate Microsoft Corp.’s Office suite to Linux. Microsoft said it’s not involved and suggests that IBM might do it by emulation.

80 Comments

IBM is smarter they are building a new OS based on Linux behind the scences..trust me.

2004-02-15 11:31 am

There’s an OSX port of Office too. Most stuff will already build using *nix tools. The part that needs to be ported is the gui layer.

2004-02-15 11:49 am

I find it stupid, why don’t they support OpenOffice.org?

2004-02-15 11:50 am

He makes claims that they can port MS Office to Linux (entirely impossible without rewriting most of it)

Ever heard of open32 or winelib?

2004-02-15 11:53 am

I know there are some people that demand MS Office. They won’t even look at OpenOffice.org because they think they want the “real thing” or something.

There are some accounting packages that use Word to generate and print off invoices and I know that companies really suck but unless you need that feature of that accounting software OpenOffice is really a much better choice. Openoffice is free, much more stable, you don’t get stuck with an old version, and it’s actually more intuitive and less confusing (as long as your not trained solid on MSOffice like some lame secretaries I know). It is also much more secure and doesn’t have problems with Macrovirus. The file formats are MUCH better and it can even recover corrupt word documents that MSoffice can’t and it can export to PDF.

2004-02-15 11:58 am

Does it means IBM could have access to MSOffice source code ?

2004-02-15 12:14 pm

Hmmm, it’s allready been done. NASA scientists and Engineers run Microsoft office in emulation on their linux machines. NASA has departments that use linux and NetBSD .. they use OpenBSD for their firewall.

It is no big deal since computers are so powerfull these days overhead means nothing. Of course their emulation software is custom hacked and they haven’t released it to the public as of yet even though they are tax payer funded.

2004-02-15 12:15 pm

heavily, because if this happens and the word about it gets spread around, people and companies will say “if it’s (star office, ooo) not good enough for ibm, it’s certainly not up to the task, and therefore not good enough for us.”

and that “sun is too small” is not even an argument, because star office (openoffice) is open-source, so even if sun would go bancrupt, ibm could develop it further. heck, it would even good for them if sun would go down, because then they could control openoffice.

not too speak of the costs they would save in switching to star office/openoffice.

the real reson for not switching over to star office is that sun is direct competiton (hard- and software) – the recent open letter might also not have helped to improve the relationship…;-)

i just hope ibm will rethink it’s strategy!

2004-02-15 12:27 pm

For many companies GNU/Linux without Microsoft Office is a no-go. No matter how much you like StarOffice/OpenOffice, many companies are tied to Microsoft Office because OO.org Word conversion is not good enough (just try to open a 200 page Word document with images and tables in OO), many Office-specific things are not supported, etc.

IBM is just listening to its customers.

I know I will get flamed for this. But I think many people who are screaming that the OO.org import/conversion is good have no real-life experience. I have indexed some scientific biology (plant physiology) books. During the last five years we have tried to use StarOffice for each book, but conversion just messed up everything. In an ideal world we would use LaTeX or OpenOffice from the start, but unfortunately everybody sends in manuscripts in Word format. Most authors are no computer specialists, so switching to OO.org is no option in the short-term.

It seems pretty weird that IBM won’t even bring over their own office suite to Linux. There’s nothing wrong with Lotus Smart Suite.

2004-02-15 12:52 pm

Uuummmm, it seems as though no one has considered the possibility that IBM will offer multiple office suites. This would, of course, make sense. OOo is going to be their secret weapon with their OS on the lolo, I think. But, they wanna be able to meet EVERYONE’s needs.

2004-02-15 1:16 pm

“For many companies GNU/Linux without Microsoft Office is a no-go. No matter how much you like StarOffice/OpenOffice, many companies are tied to Microsoft Office because OO.org Word conversion is not good enough (just try to open a 200 page Word document with images and tables in OO), many Office-specific things are not supported, etc. ”

afaik comp. will be further improved with ooo 2.0.

ibm should therefore at least help improving it parallel to “porting” ms office.

“I know I will get flamed for this. But I think many people who are screaming that the OO.org import/conversion is good have no real-life experience.”

i do, at least with huge and quite complex powerpoint-presentations and some smaller excel-files, and the comp. was, while not perfect, good enough, means nothing was misformatted in way that important stuff was missing or messed-up.

some things like “autoforms” are truly missed, though, as well as some easy tasks as pagenumbering are incredibly diffcult with ooo, but all these things will get adressed in 2.0 according to the roadmap.

mfst moving to xml as fileformat might also help with increasing comp., that means if they won’t come through with their patent(s) or if there’s a way around.

2004-02-15 1:22 pm

I think it is perfectly okay to give support to CodeWeavers for those projects that want to see Office emulated, but porting it is just downright dumb. Hopefully they just give credit where credit is due, to the OpenOffice developers.

2004-02-15 1:22 pm

” In an ideal world we would use LaTeX or …”

Absolutely. I’m working with LaTeX and I can tell you that using Word for scientific purposes is a no go. The mathematics in Word looks rediculous and the document layout is extremely uncertain. Don’t get me started on footnote, index and TOC generation …. I’d suggest office packages should use LaTeX as the typesetting engine and provide a GUI for the interaction with LaTeX. If you really need professional publishing tools, then MS Office is down right useless.

2004-02-15 1:27 pm

Absolutely. I’m working with LaTeX and I can tell you that using Word for scientific purposes is a no go. The mathematics in Word looks rediculous and the document layout is extremely uncertain. Don’t get me started on footnote, index and TOC generation …. I’d suggest office packages should use LaTeX as the typesetting engine and provide a GUI for the interaction with LaTeX. If you really need professional publishing tools, then MS Office is down right useless.

Yep I agree. But using LaTeX is not doable with manuscripts coming in in Word format and a tight budget. I personally use LaTeX for my papers, essays et al, but it only works if a substantial part of the contributors use LaTeX.

2004-02-15 1:33 pm

“unfortunately everybody sends in manuscripts in Word format”

Manuscripts in Word format!?!? Ouch! Word is not good for writing anything other than term papers and short reports. Manuscripts should be written in LaTex or something equivalent.

2004-02-15 1:36 pm

It’s just a big waste of time discus something like this. It’s not going to happen. IBM gets 0 doing this. Is this a joke?

2004-02-15 1:39 pm

LaTeX is okay…but it is not exactly flawless, some of my (dumbass) professors have very specific formatting requirements for all submitted papers that are at best difficult to achieve using LaTeX if not nearly impossible with all probability. However, I will admit that I haven’t done much with LaTeX for a while, but I have written an essay or writeup or two so I am not totally clueless about LaTeX.

BTW there is a frontend to LaTeX called LyX and it’s KDE-flavored cousin KLyX.

Personally, I use OOo almost exclusively for these tasks, and submit the result electronically using PDF. It is much, much easier than using LaTeX, although admittedly I haven’t had to do much math/science work in college for some time now.

2004-02-15 1:51 pm

IBM has been under the gun of the “fake” media (CNN) lately, for their support of non Microsoft products. There is no telling what they are going to spout off, to keep these wolves off their backs.

2004-02-15 2:00 pm

Am I the only one who thinks IBM would have an easier time using Office X for Mac and running it on top of a PPC emulator?

I mean Office X is in essence a Office port to UNIX. I reckon there are better PPC emultors than Windows emulators.

Anyway, the day MSFT decides to port Office to Linux I bet you it will be from their mac version. There’s no sense for them emulating windows on linux, they will just recompile their port.

2004-02-15 2:10 pm

I don’t think so. Microsoft didn’t completely rewrite Office for Mac. It was built on the Carbon API, which Apple designed to support the older OS 9 and earlier applications.

It is an enormous job to rewrite Office for a completely new API. IBM would need to create something like WINE, but this is exactly why Microsoft uses those hidden routines in their API, to prevent someone running their applications on a Windows ‘clone’.

Maybe some more of that leaked source code will help. : )

2004-02-15 2:19 pm

What’s so bad about IBM working on a MS Office suite for Linux? OpenOffice isn’t bad at all, but MS Office is standard these days. For big companies running Linux, a MS Office version for Linux would be good. At least, that what I think…

2004-02-15 2:24 pm

Personally, I use OOo almost exclusively for these tasks, and submit the result electronically using PDF. It is much, much easier than using LaTeX, although admittedly I haven’t had to do much math/science work in college for some time now.

Really? I started learning latex two days ago, and moved my thesis from OOo to latex. It took me less time to figure out how to do a TOC, bibliography or an index in latex than in OOo. In fact, I still haven’t found out how to make OOo number my appendix chapters with letters instead of numbers.

2004-02-15 2:31 pm

Means overhead; more expensive hardware.

This doesn’t hurt Linux. It’s the same as with WINE (1), Cygwin. Does that hurt Linux?

It helps IBM. Because MS Office is still propritary. Think about it when IBM may only distribute the native port. Or when only IBM has the money to do so.

Ultimately it would give Linux users choice.

I only hope the virus possibilities won’t be ported :>

Another thing perhaps thinking about which could be related is that IBM supports TCPA (or whatever it’s called today). At the time Big Blue Linux is out, Longhorn is too.

IBM should use your money to develop OpenOffice (to free people from M$) and Wine (to let MS Office dependents to run this application on linux without buy Vmware or Crossover Office).

Why someone who paid more thar US$ 300 for a M$ Office suite will prefer to run it on a free linux ? Most of them already paid M$ Tax when bought a computer with MS Windows pre-installed.

The definitive solution for smart people is run OpenOffice, Lyx, laTeX, Abiword or other free text typeseting systems on linux.

2004-02-15 3:19 pm

I think people are making too much out of IBM comments.

First, i don’t thing any company can grab some other company’s product (e.g. MS Office) and port it without a license to do so, even if IBM has access to MS Office source code.

Second, as MS reps are saying if IBM is working with MS Office in Linux, it must be on emulation mode. Why will IBM duplicate what Codeweaver can do now quite well? Besides, running MS Office on emulation mode under a non-MS sanctioned OS is dangerous. MS can easily and LEGALLY modify their MS Office license stipulating that it can only be run under MS Windows (or Mac, if that is the case).

Third, IBM says that Sun’s Star Office is too small, they are not saying anything about OpenOffice. IBM could be secretely working with creating much improved import/export MS Office file format filters and with improving the usability problems with OOo (i.e. label handling, mail merging, page numbering, table handling). They can even incorporate their grammar checker from WordPro into OOo. Am sure they can re-work OOo UI to emulate more closely MS Office. Don’t forget that Apple worked secretely with KDE Konqueror for a while and made many significant improvements before announcing it publictly as Safari and rolling their improvements into the Konqueror code. Of course their OOo based product doesn’t have to be open sourced, just like Star Office is not. Their product can be called SmartSuite 10. <My speculation>

Lastly, before IBM bought Lotus, theyr were using StarOffice internally and they were even considering by Star, which they considered then a more promising product than SamartSuite. They bought Lotus because of Notes and the brand recognition (Lotus)

2004-02-15 3:33 pm

Only Linux and UNIX people would try and suggest LaTeX is a better option rather than investment in trying to product a widely acceptable Office suite in Linux.

God… do you really think it will help Linux adoption if to edit a document you have to in effect learn how to write script?

documentclass{badidea}

itle{LaTeX for geeks only}

author{me}

date{Feb 2004}

egin{document}

maketitle

Please please get out and smell the air and look at the sun and everything else in the real world sometime folks…

end{document}

2004-02-15 3:43 pm

I’ve seen the Linux distro and Office is running under WINE. That’s it.

2004-02-15 3:47 pm

Openoffice, MS Office, LaTeX, … fine.

But ever tried Text602? You can find it at http://www.software602.com. I installed the previous version once and I have to say it was a very good word processor. You could download and use it for personal use. It seems you can download and use the current version also for free. Windows only tough.

2004-02-15 3:52 pm

While everyone complains about “yet another Xandros review”, no one seems to have bothered to read them… Xandros 2.0 will run many of the Microsoft Office version out of the box!

2004-02-15 4:05 pm

IBM, the self-proclaimed darling of Linux, is still struggling to create a viable Linux desktop solution.

John

2004-02-15 4:08 pm

IBM owns part of Windows, and has access to the “secret API’s” needed for such a port. I wouldn’t doubt that under the leftovers of the old M$/IBM lawsuit that IBM can and does have access to Office’s source code. (at the time, Microsoft figured that at worst IBM would port it to OS/2 I would wager)

2004-02-15 4:29 pm

Remember OS2? Windows compatability did IBM no favors there, it just became a Windows emulator that never worked quite as well as Windows.

So, I hope this is a real port, not just a mix of Wine and MSOffice.

2004-02-15 4:49 pm

@Nate Downes

“IBM owns part of Windows..”

Well they still might have access to Windows 3.1 code, but they don’t “own” anything newer.

@cheezwog

OS/2 ran Windows 3.1 code better than MS Window 3.1 did.

2004-02-15 5:07 pm

“It’s just a big waste of time discus something like this. It’s not going to happen. IBM gets 0 doing this. Is this a joke?”

IBM gets 0 for doing this if you are naive enough to believe IBM makes its money on selling products. If instead, you admit that IBM knows the money is in the services, then IBM would be very smart to do this.

Everyone here is saying OpenOffice can’t do this, or LateX is a better choice. If IBM can offer a wide range of choices including, Microsoft Office, Star Office/OpenOffice & LateX for word processing, then IBM can answer a far wider range of needs for their customer base.

“For many companies GNU/Linux without Microsoft Office is a no-go”

Then IBM would be foolish as a company to recommend OpenOffice if it would not meet the needs of the customer. However, for those businesses that only use 20% of the features that Microsoft Office contains, OpenOffice or StarOffice could well be the right choice.

“Only Linux and UNIX people would try and suggest LaTeX is a better option rather than investment in trying to product a widely acceptable Office suite in Linux.”

LateX is a better option depending on what one needs to accomplish. Is it right for the typical secretary? Most likely not.

“IBM, the self-proclaimed darling of Linux, is still struggling to create a viable Linux desktop solution. ”

The solutions already exist and IBM did not and does not have to create them. For those who must have Microsoft Office, there is CodeWeavers. For those who only need basic word processing needs, there is OpenOffice. For those who need LateX, there are Kile, Lyx and others.

If IBM can offer office solutions, both proprietary and free, with the ability to connect any of this software to any database, then IBM grows their market share further.

2004-02-15 5:28 pm

I haven’t looked at OpenOffice recently. The killer for us last time we looked was the non-existence of multi-author collaboration and commenting tools, ability to accept and reject changes on a change-by-change basis, and, especially, the Office2k3 “smart” change tracking (like working out what you were treating as an ‘atomic’ cnange). Has there been an improvement on that front recently?

2004-02-15 5:28 pm

…I hope they give it a native interface. If they intend on making this available to the public, I’d like to be using Office in GTK2 if possible.

2004-02-15 5:49 pm

I once read that a huge persentage of the MS business for Office was due to sales of the product to people who use a Mac.

It is a huge advantage to have their product ported to Mac.

As Linux gains market share, anyone having propriatary software that has been ported to Linux, especially a product like MS Office, will be in a very good place.

Having Office run on Linux is a huge advantage for MS. With companies like Novell, Sun, and IBM developing Linux as the OS of the future, Microsoft needs to be in a position to not allow Sun’s StarOffice, or any other suite, to be the office suite of choice for Linux any time soon.

One may argue that a port of Office for Linux will encorage would-be Linux converts to switch, but if you have good Office suite like Star or OOo working, they will convert any way. Porting MS Office now would be like a preemptive strike and that’s simply smart business.

MS Office is a money pit. I guess it wouldn’t hurt to have it available on Linux, but I can’t imagine why anyone would buy it when there is such a large variety of choices (that people don’t know about).

2004-02-15 6:52 pm

I’d agree to what Annon wrote: having Office on Linux would be quite good for Microsoft I think. But if they ported it themselves, they would admit that Linux is a valable choice over their own BS. So it may very probably be that they are working together with IBM, promoting the Product as beeing converted by IBM only.

2004-02-15 7:01 pm

About porting the OSX version of Office to Linux:

If the OSX version is based on Cocoa, why not port it using GNUstep? I thought GNUstep was based on the same Openstep standard as Cocoa.

2004-02-15 7:02 pm

I have thought of another possiblity that I haven’t seen anybody mention. –.Net– If Microsoft is going to go full tilt with their .Net implementation, then they will need to show that their own applications are compliant. If IBM can assist in the Mono project http://www.go-mono.com/ to get some of the applications “ported” properly, then it drops the amount of “emulation” that is required. If the code is written in a “sane and compliant” manner, emulation will not really be the word you would be using. Of course this all depends on a stable API, compliance to the “official” .Net standards as well as not programming without certain assumptions.

If done properly, this does several things. One, it should give MS a “unified” codebase for Office. Two “porting” to other OSes (OSX, Linux, Palm, et al) is less of a hassle. Three, if it works, MS will only support the platforms it chooses to, while the rest of us might purchase office because it runs on our OS/Platform of choice.

Could it happen, maybe. Will it happen, only time will tell. Of course I could be completely wrong on this one.

2004-02-15 7:31 pm

“[…] you admit that IBM knows the money is in the services, then IBM would be very smart to do this.”

And OEM discount goes for Office too i guess? Or not?

2004-02-15 8:02 pm

Because MS office is so much better-looking and is more pleasant to use. OpenOffice simply turns laypeople off.

2004-02-15 8:09 pm

Office X does not use Cocoa, it uses Carbon.

2004-02-15 8:13 pm

IBM could have done a real port of that, to Linux. Why didn’t they? MS Office is more popular, true, but IBM has the sourcecode for Lotus Office, plus the whole dev team. Wouldn’t IBM gain more by prmoting, selling and supporting it’s own product?

BTW, I really like StarOffice! I use it on Windows, and it’s great. I can nicely export my stuff in .pdf, and the presentations are really cool.

2004-02-15 8:28 pm

Why hasn’t IBM ported Lotus Office Suit over to linux? I WordPro, Lotus123, Approach, and Free Lance graphics are outstanding office products that compete well against MS office and is the office suite of choice for me. Why even waste time with emulating enviroments or even trying to convice MS to port to Linux when there is an outstanding office suite in house?

Jim

2004-02-15 8:37 pm

” Manuscripts in Word format!?!? Ouch! Word is not good for writing anything other than term papers and short reports. Manuscripts should be written in LaTex or something equivalent. ”

Actually there are many authors and scientists that use Word for everything. The only thing good for Term Papers and short reports is KOffice. If you knew what you were talking about, you might be dangerous.

2004-02-15 8:37 pm

I know one of the first comments was about this, but everybody else seems to be ignoring the fact that MS Office / Adobe Photoshop work GREAT on Linux through Codeweaver’s excellent Crossover Office product. IBM would be best served by buying Crossover Office or Codeweavers completely, and marketing the hell out of it.

If stories like this can get so much traction, it’s clear that not enough people know about CX Office.

IBM already has Lotus for Linux, but they’ll release it only when Blue Linux is released.

IBM’s next step after IBM/PC will be IBM/POWER/PC/WITH LINUX

:]

2004-02-15 8:58 pm

They want All-in-one super Office suite?

They Should make a mix of OOo and Lotus

That would be smthng to l00k at…

2004-02-15 9:18 pm

What’s with all the “Blue Linux” conspiracy theories? You guys sound like Mac people. I mean seriously — you’d think that some macrumors.com people got lost over here…

IBM hasn’t announced “Blue Linux,” and thus as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t exist.

2004-02-15 9:20 pm

Why do people keep thinking that you can just combine two programs to make “one super-duper-awesome-nifty-ultra-cool program!” Combining the code bases of two programs almost never happens in real life. Programming just doesn’t work like that…

2004-02-15 10:09 pm

If they want to port MS office thats fine, but as long as I have a program that does the exact same as MS office but without any cost (Open office) im not interrested. Those who say “oo looks awfull”, I really have no idea what youre talking about. They look the same.

2004-02-15 10:10 pm

sure, we run emulation layers, etc. But why would they want to emulate that? What’s in it for them? An office suite? We have those. Gobe wont’ build gobe 3 and release it for BeOS, ms makes office suite for mac os, or whatever, and now, this.

IBM stands to gain what? Nothing, if anything they stand to lose.

2004-02-15 10:23 pm

they would be giving them the front door to dominate the power processor.

It would be most foolish move in computer history. the most foolish move, ever.

2004-02-15 10:28 pm

furthermore, whoever thought of doing that, should be fired, even if they made the comapany a 100 bn last year, and drew a trillion dollar salary./ Fire them, fire them, fire them!

2004-02-15 10:44 pm

Anyone who believes his pipe dream is gullible, tell ya what i have a peice of the sahara in the Florida everglades I want to sell. The thing ios that this port is a good idea and Just because open Source purists will not use it so what, you arent the targeted audience.

2004-02-15 10:46 pm

“There’s an OSX port of Office too.”

What on earth are you talking about. Why port it when it runs natively already? That’s what the entire Mac Business Unit at Microsoft does. I’m running Office X as we speak. The Mac Unit at MS has done a fairly good job of bringing Office to OS X. They are close to releasing Office 2003 for OS X this year. That will rock.

I love OS X.

2004-02-15 10:55 pm

“IBM has the sourcecode for Lotus Office, plus the whole dev team. Wouldn’t IBM gain more by prmoting, selling and supporting it’s own product?”

IBM has never had what it takes for this kind of stuff. They’ll try to co-opt someone elses innovation before they invest in the long-term in their own software sometimes. Just look at OS/2. The fact of the matter is, IBM’s $80+ / year revenue is most from lame consulting service via their Global Services Unit. Without websphere, are they even on the software map? Well, I suppose there is AIX. But geez, a good portion of that code was licensed by them and not innovated by them. Hang on, there is DB2. But, for such a large company with what seems like endless resources, their innovation seems severely finite in comparison.

2004-02-15 11:22 pm

That’s what large companies do — they buy out or coopt other peoples’ software, not innovate on their own. IBM does this, Microsoft does this, even Apple does it to an extent. Its the nature of the industry, that’s all.

2004-02-15 11:22 pm

That’s what large companies do — they buy out or coopt other peoples’ software, not innovate on their own. IBM does this, Microsoft does this, even Apple does it to an extent. Its the nature of the industry, that’s all.

2004-02-15 11:40 pm

IBM needs to just write their own office suite. I’d buy IBM Office, if it wasn’t overpriced.

2004-02-15 11:57 pm

‘If they want to port MS office thats fine, but as long as I have a program that does the exact same as MS office but without any cost (Open office) im not interrested.’

The major feature of MS Office that OpenOffice lacks is the ability to flawlessly open MS Office documents. I tried opening some fairly complex Word documents in the latest version of OpenOffice and they were all messed up. Some just had minor formatting problems, but a couple were a total mess.

OpenOffice may be a good app, but the majority of businesses and schools/colleges use Microsoft software. A lot of people need to be able to work with MS Office documents, without worrying about them getting mangled. Someone can hardly insist that other people switch to a different office suite just because they’re not using the industry standard.

2004-02-16 1:04 am

1. MS will not help anyone to port their Killer application to Linux. MS able to port their applications to any platform. Why they let IBM do?

2. The article said Lotus Notes ported to Java. If IBM have a fast and better method to port Win application to Linux, why they don’t use it on Lotus Notes?

3. According to some old OS/2 news, IBM have a WIN32 emulator on OS/2. If that is correct, IBM can produce a WIN32 emulator on Linux that is based on MS source code in a short time.

2004-02-16 3:06 am

Um, Chris, IBM has their own office suite. It’s called “Lotus SmartSuite”. They’ve had it for quite some time now.

What is really strange that they haven’t ported it to Linux.

2004-02-16 3:25 am

“It seems pretty weird that IBM won’t even bring over their own office suite to Linux. There’s nothing wrong with Lotus Smart Suite.”

Back in the days of Office 97, Lotus just didn’t have a product on the level of MS Office. Everyone bought the best available. To Microsoft’s credit, it will be very tough for anyone to market a competing product even for FREE. Apparently IBM has done their homework and came to the same conclusion.

I look for IBM to package MS Office with whatever they are currently developing for an OS.

It’s going to become a very interesting place on the day the world figures out what IBM has in the works, and I bet the Linux crowd isn’t going to like it one bit. IBM has never given anything away for free, and they ain’t about to start now.

2004-02-16 3:45 am

It will only serve to entrench MS Office even more. Just as the excellent emulation of Windows 3.1 by OS/2 meant that developers weren’t writing native OS/2 apps, if IBM were to truly port MS Office to Linux using emulation, that would be playing into MS’s hands.

Since they control the API, they could easily modify future versions of Office to break emulation or possibly even do so with service packs.

Regardless of the pain of the learning curve, I think the time is right. Take OpenOffice or some other project and make it kickass – then market it aggressively to their customers.

Spend the resources to provide the same functionality that Office does and give all the help to migrate businesses who are Office-dependent away.

That the only way to do, in my opinion.

2004-02-16 4:06 am

I have been using MS Office 97 under Linux for the last year or two. It runs under the enhanced version of wine and the font end for it that comes with CrossoverOffice. Codeweavers sells CrossOver Office for about $60. It allows people to run either Office 97, Office 2000 or Office XP under Linux. It does not currently support Office 2003. They hope to support Office 2003 in a future version. I read somewhere that they get an error message that says something like “Wrong Version of Windows” when installing Office 2003.

I use Red Hat 9 as my main OS and am able to run Word 97, Excel 97, Powerpoint 97 and Adobe Photoshop 7.0. I also use many excellent native Linux programs such as Open Office, Textmaker, Ximain Evolution, Mozilla Firefox and others. I like being able to use either. So if this story is actually true, does it mean that IBM will be doing something more than CrossOver Office already does? Here is a link that shows what CrossoverOffice currently allows Linux to run:

IBM dosent want to embrase OpenOffice, the code that Sun donated. They dont like StarOffice. They want to kill off all of sun’s open source and linux plans. They’re dirty businessmen

2004-02-16 7:37 am

Who really cares what a word processor looks like? There are several comments about OOo not looking as good as MSword. Ahh…it’s to use people..not to look at! The incompatibility of Office with other suites is the only reason people stick with msoffice. Is there really much of a difference these days? – I’m talking about 95% of the population here…not the 5% of power users that can’t live without feature X.

I was hoping that with MS moving to XML that file compatibility would become a non-issue but, typically, it’s looking like business as usual.

Ultimately, if I wanted to use msoffice I’d use Windows. But I don’t so I won’t.

Paul – You the man!!! Did anyone catch this? If Microsoft is going to go full tilt with their .Net implementation, then they will need to show that their own applications are compliant.

It makes more sense strategically to wait for Microsoft to port Office to .Net. Once MS Office has been released in the .Net world, it is fair game to complete and optimize Mono or dotGNU to work better with MS Office than Windows can. Sweeeet!

2004-02-16 2:44 pm

To convert all of this .DOC files into something Oo.o can deal with?

I mean… when all the documents around became of Oo.o type, there will be no compatibility issues! And IBM can earn big money offering a service to do this kind of migration.

2004-02-16 3:42 pm

Whether or not a document converts OK, is down to how it is formatted in the first instance, if it is formatted crap, in the original document it will more than likely transfer crap.

I also live in the real world. Most documents I have ever had to give out to a windows person and receive back have been ok.

Formatting is a bit naff anyway. Concentration on the content and not the bloody formatting is a much better way to go. Unfortunately most companies are run by sheep, and this is why we have this stupid discussion ad finitum about how good or bad it is to exchange info with office.

One day the people will wake up to the waste of time formatting is in a word-processor…………

2004-02-16 6:08 pm

If Microsoft doesn’t care why help them out? Put all the work into OpenOffice and watch them squirm.

2004-02-16 11:28 pm

IBM used to have a perfectly fine office suite of their own why don’t they use that or make their own tweaked version of OpenOffice like Lycoris does?

I know what they’re afraid of is that MS will change their office word and excel format so other programs can’t save in it anymore but I say screw em! save in openoffice’s format and force others to get openoffice or a viewer for it! I for one am sick and tired of the attitude that we all have to be compatible with their stuff!

2004-02-17 12:37 am

At the moment every large company will stick to MS Office because every other large company is on it and they need compatibility. But if all the companies that fear or could make money out of a weakened MS ie Sony, Nokia, IBM swapped to OpenOffice and insisted their suppliers ensured their files were compatible then OO would have serious momentum behind it. Office is the golden egg for MS, I am surprised their rivals are not doing more to break its power.